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Topic: My Birthday, in more ways than one (Read 6381 times)

Today is my 56th birthday.I went through a lot of loss between 2000 and 2005. Sister, father, grandmother and business partner/intense, complex and ultimately tragic romantic relationship. And, as an NYC girl, I’m counting 9/11…….there was a period of time when I didn’t trust floors not to fall out from under me. It was a lot to process in a short time and I just smoothed a lot of it over and carried on.

In 2008 the tide went out and my worldview crashed and I saw that a system I had believed in had been overtaken by greedy and stupid. My spirit was sick.

The free-floating anger was overtaking me and hormonal fluctuations weren’t helping either. I was always angry, irritated and fatigued and I couldn’t get up in the morning. My brain stopped working properly and tasks that used to be easy became difficult which gave me lots of anxiety. I was taking a low dosage Prozac which helped a little but not much. I began supplementing with poppy pod tea, if I sipped at a thermos of the stuff I could get through the day and feel good. After about 8 months I tapered off by using kratom………but after 2 or 3 months of that I bought more pods. For the next few years I continued this roller coaster. A little less than a year ago I tried to quit completely by doing a slow taper of the poppies.

I managed to taper down to about a rounded teaspoon of ground poppy pods a day but I was still using 4-6 grams of kratom a day, and I got stuck there. Every time I tried to taper further I felt so bad I couldn’t get up in the morning and function and there was always a reason not to cut back THIS this week……………my place of business got wrecked during Sandy, I went through a long period where I had to work 12 hour days just to keep up..etc, etc.

I was still careful not to INCREASE the doses……… so the small doses became less effective. This made it even harder to commit to tapering further.

Then I discovered Iboga. I considered a flood treatment but I couldn’t figure out how to get a sitter and get away for a stress-free week. I probably could get away for a week but I would be incredibly stressed out worrying about my foster kid and my business, and for legal reasons I was hesitant to ask my any of my friends to sit with me. I also thought the flood doses IWorld recommended were frightfully high and my profound sensitivity to SSRI’s – I got severe facial pain, neck pain and headaches if I used more than 15mg of Prozac a day, -- was a deep concern. So I e-mailed back and forth with them and they recommended microdosing.

Now I am an old hand at the art of microdosing because of years keeping my low dose Prozac balanced. I used a liquid version and developed a good sense of how many mg’s I needed a day to keep the level constant.

At first I took a 300mg capsule of RB daily for about 5 days. The first few days were incredible but that’s just my body chemistry and I knew it wouldn’t last………..I get the same rush the first few days after I began taking an SSRI and I know it’s not an indication of the long term effects….but it gave me a nice little window . After 5 days the drug had built up so I stopped for a day then dropped down to 50mg a day. ( I open the capsules and pour a little it into an empty gelcap, eyeballing the amount).

By now the euphoric effects had stopped, but I still felt good.

I stopped the low Prozac doses right after I ordered the RB and took half my usual poppy/kratom doses the first 5 days and I continued to taper. After 5 days or so at 50mg I began to build the RB dose again, now it’s about 100mg a day. My poppy kratom use was minimal the 5 days and I took nothing yesterday—the taper is complete.

I have been doing meditations every evening…I found that putting on some soft lyrical music and letting my mind open up took me to some amazing places .At first I tried with classical and then spa music but it didn’t resonate with me but my favorite ballads keep me in the right frame of mind – I think everyone has music that “speaks” to them. I began to see my psyche as a tangled knot of jewelry chains and I began to try to work out the tangles. Some nights I had some really amazing relevations that let me let go of a lot of guilt and baggage and some nights there were no major discoveries. I have made a lot of progress in the past few weeks, up until two weeks ago was blaming my drug problem on menopause and it was only my self-examination that led me to the true causes. I am also working on reinforcing positive thought patterns and keeping my thoughts out of the well-traveled rutted roads of negative thoughts. The negative thought patterns are like a rutted road and the “wheels” of your thoughts naturally settle into the well-worn ruts unless you try to keep them out then blaze new paths along positive lines.

And I took the big step, I went through my apartment and threw out everything ---all the pods, seeds and about 12 ounces of Kratom capsules. To me this was the key………..the emergency stash is just a slip waiting to happen and I know how the addict mind works.

Now I have to heal my spirit and build a different, gentler life. I’m real good at having the courage to change the things I can change and the wisdom to know the difference but I’m a little weak in the serenity to accept the things I can’t change department so I’ve got my work cut out for me.So, SERENITY NOW !!

Hi there! happy birthday. your story is a lot like mine. I just came off kratom use after 8 months of it. (just this past week ) same way , little heavier RB dose. I don't have any cravings, and I'm happy to be free of just another ball and chain. I'm trying to improve my thought process, meditate more and. let things go ..... congratulations

It was a little difficult to get motivated because of my habit of doing a gram of kratom to get me up and moving but I got out eventually.

The Wood definitely seems clearer and more grounded now that I'm not taking anything else on top of it. I have started writing again, something that I stopped doing in the late 1990's. Sometimes after I meditate I get so many thoughts swirling around in my head that I have to start writing in order to turn them into a cohesive narrative in order to clear my head, and then once I write it I keep going back and refining it...........I'll probably post some of it here eventually.

And I am amazed at how well my profound hyper sensitivity to SSRI type meds is serving me with the iboga, when I compare my doses to the microdoses other people take I'm really taking almost nothing, I took about 100 mg yesterday and I only took 50mg today.

The one time when I took 300mg in the morning and another 300 in the afternoon I felt pretty trippy, so I am thinking about going away for a long weekend, finding a nice place to stay with some privacy, and seeing what happens if I take 1 to 2 grams of root bark. I can't do this at home because my teenaged god-son lives with me ( his Mom's an old friend of mine that became a crackhead and disappeared).

I'd be interested in seeing if I might be able to get a minor spiritual experience without all the puking and ataxia.

So, I haven’t been around much lately but I thought I’d check in with a progress report.

Long story short, It worked. I’ve been substantially clean for almost 18 months now, and the few slips that I had were minor and isolated. I have a whole new life now.

I worked hard to build a sustainable recovery – I took care not to jump into a dozen different ventures that I wouldn’t follow through on. I started by taking a few yoga classes, then I took a few more. I started to meet new like-minded people and eventually some of them become close friends. I developed a regular social life. I joined a women’s group and a global awareness discussion group and made more friends.

Through my meditations, chakra work and neuroscience study, I began to explore the patterns that had been driving my behavior and began to learn to recognize them and move them towards more empowering and healthy patterns. The Iboga was a wonderful plant teacher and I took care to treat it as a teacher instead of letting it do all the work for me. I micro-dosed on and off for about a year, moving towards smaller doses with each micro-dose cycle. But I learned to tap into and replicate some of the plant’s energies and now I can recall those tools at will without micro-dosing.

And I don’t crave or miss drugs at all. The most important thing I’ve learned is that when you are “high on life”, you’re still high. It really is wonderful being happy so much of the time without being disconnected from reality and world around me.

On my last micro-dose cycle early this summer, I literally took 35mg of RB a week for 5 weeks. This is not a typo and it was possibly my most effective cycle ever. Based on my experience, I strongly believe that there is a homeopathic resonance to Iboga and that less is often more – that is what I hope other’s might take away from my experience

thank you for sharing Alexandra Lost. So happy that your recovery has gone so well. Love your message. You put in the work and got the results. Really needed to hear this. Haven't touched iboga in about a year, but am thinking about a micro dose cycle sometime soon,so your experience report has got me thinking to take similar small doses. Perhaps about 100mg a week to start.

I just thought I’d pop in with a quick note to let everyone know I’m still around. And still clean - although there were a few occasions where I took a couple of grams of kratom for energy - I’m still not perfect or anything:).

But no opiates. And I have a much better life now. 5 years ago I was very distant from my family but now we have reconnected and are very close. And, through my yoga practice, I have made lots of friends and I feel that I am part of a community.

This is what keeps me clean. The life I have now is not compatible with addiction. Connection is really the key.